Building Fair & Resilient Systems - Northern Real Farming Conference

Community ownership and land matching

February 15, 2024February 15, 2024 by Andi Chapple

Access to land for aspiring or experienced farmers can be a challenge. Land prices now outstrip the potential returns from small-scale farming so that fields which could be used for food production are often sold for housing, as an investment, for carbon off-setting or other more lucrative uses. This contributes to a widening gap between urban and rural areas, which is leaving whole communities disconnected from the land and dependent on an industrialised food system which is contributing to ill-health and climate breakdown.

But there is another way: throughout the UK many communities are finding creative ways to come together to protect our green, rural spaces for food growing and landscape recovery. Featuring case studies from successful projects, this one-day farm visit will:

Explore case studies of getting land into community ownership, including Moss Lane farm’s work and strategy
Include a tour of Moss Lane farm and the community businesses that share the land
Be a chance to identify further actions to support greater land access for agroecological farming in the North of England

Follow the link below to join us and explore different ways to access land for food, farming and nature, including community ownership and land matching:

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/northernrealfarmingconference/1138481

10.30am – 4pm (lunch provided)

Moss Lane Farm, M30 7RL, near Eccles (Salford), Thursday 21 March 2024.

Outline programme:

10.30 am Arrival/tea/coffee

10.45am Introductions and welcome

11.30am Context: the qualifications landscape and progress/challenges towards embedding agroecology in existing models

11.30pm Tour of Haigh Hall

1.00pm Lunch

1.45pm Co-designing a L2

3.15pm Collation of feedback on current system

3.30pm Wrap up and next steps/what more is needed in the North?

4pm Close

Building a vibrant workforce in our landscapes

Hosted by FFCC

What might a Land and Nature Skills Service for Cumbria look like? We will be focusing on mapping initiatives in Cumbria and Northern England.

Come along to see the skills initiatives we have mapped and add to it. We will discuss what the opportunities, challenges and gaps are based on our online NRFC session, discussions at this session and broader scoping work.

We will share a picture what a Land and Nature Skills Service might look like and through this session we hope to:
– continue to build on the networks, make more connections
– join up the dots between what’s going on and what the priorities are

This will feed into the continued process of scoping to support delivery of what’s needed.

Background:

Highly skilled people are needed to enable a transition to regenerative and holistic farming approaches and deliver on national (and even international) priorities in the context of the multiple and interlinked biodiversity, climate and health crises. Access to knowledge, learning, training and employment are vital to ensure a just transition.

In Cumbria, the need for training and employment is framed by the loss of Newton Rigg College as it was, the need to support farmers to transition to new policy focused on public goods delivery, and the need to deliver on other policy priorities such as green recovery, net zero carbon and nature recovery.

We have been in a process of codesign since October 2020 and have begun scoping what’s needed to deliver land- and nature- based skills training and learning in Cumbria. This has led to a proposal for a Land and nature skills Service for Cumbria, which could act as a central hub of information, support increased delivery and act as an intermediary between policy priorities and capacity for delivery locally. This would support people wanting to join the sector and those already in it to access information, resources and contacts they need.

Speakers/hosts include:

Hannah Field – Hannah Coordinates the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission’s (FFCC) Cumbria Inquiry and is a PhD Student at the University of Cumbria, researching Common Land. Hannah has spent the last 10 years in Cumbria, having worked for Forestry England, run her own business in wool craftwork, as well as studying at the University (BSc (Hons) in Animal Conservation Science and PGDip Ecosystem Services Evaluation). Her research and practical interests are in how diverse perspectives and values in land management can be brought together for social and ecological benefit through place-based decision-making.

Hannah is also passionate about wool and natural fibres grown regeneratively in the UK. She also develops regenerative livelihood programmes and helps with horticulture and livestock on a permaculture smallholding.

Carol Moffat – Carol is from The Farmer Network which is a farmer owned not-for-profit Company, limited by guarantee. We have over 1,100 farmer members and our mission is to help sustain our members’ businesses and maintain the environment, landscape and rural communities of Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales. The Farmer Network provides a range of services including fuel buying and organising training courses and workshops for farmers. We also apply for funding for projects that support farmers including those that help young people develop a farming related business, improve animal health and providing advice to farmers during the agricultural transition. www.thefarmernetwork.co.uk/

About Carol: Carol works for the Farmer Network as a project manager and the local coordinator for the Yorkshire Dales. She manages a variety of projects including coordinating the Swaledale Facilitation Fund and a project supporting farmers in the Westmorland Dales. She farms at Garsdale and is also Secretary of Baugh Fell Commoners Association and the local branch of the North of England Mule Association.

Jamie Norrington – Jamie works as the Education, Training & Volunteering Officer for Cumbria Wildlife Trust working with school pupils, college students and volunteers involved in lifelong learning about nature, ecology and local wildlife. He would like to see many more formal training opportunities for all levels of participants in our county.

The Trust has hosted Countryside Apprenticeships for many years, which have trained local young people to become Cumbria’s newest countryside rangers at the National Trust, John Muir Trust and North Pennines AONB etc, as well as postgraduate training that helped others progress to roles with the British Antarctic Survey, Fisheries Authority and many other leading organisations.

The Trust also hosts sandwich year placements from the University of Cumbria and research students from a range of universities.

Paul Cambre – Paul joined Growing Well in 2020 in a new role, ‘Head Grower’, to maximise sustainable income from our organic growing enterprise. Paul is from New Orleans and has worked and studied in the US, Canada and China. He has a Masters in sustainable agriculture and was previously Head Grower for a local two Michelin-starred restaurant.

Growing Well offers a range of training opportunities for the people they work with including a chance to study for horticultural qualifications, practical training in tractor driving, and other useful skills. For people working in the office and cooking activities, there are opportunities to attend relevant training. Find out more: www.growingwell.co.uk/

Charlotte Bickler – Charlotte leads the Knowledge Exchange and Policy team at the Organic Research Centre, ensuring that ORC’s research gets out to its key stakeholders in the best format possible. She is based in West Yorkshire and has worked as a researcher at the ORC, Kew Gardens and The University of Bristol. Most recently, she has studied the application of evolutionary breeding within organic systems and developed an on-farm organic variety testing network (now a DEFRA funded project, LiveWheat) with her ORC Crops Team colleagues, Organic Arable and a group of participatory farmers. She has also coordinated knowledge exchange and on-farm trials of crop mixtures and worked to understand the enablers required to deliver crop diversification in European agriculture. She is working to develop local hubs built around Organic Principles and practices via the Organic at the Heart project which developed out of the NRFC20 session that she led (www.organicresearchcentre.com/our-research/research-project-library/organic-at-the-heart/).

Resilience of local food networks: a social network analysis

Hosted by UCLAN

Besides known negative effects to food security outcomes for vulnerable groups, the Covid-19 pandemic has also provided new opportunities for local communities to work differently and improve outcomes for those most in need. Our research used social network analysis to focus on the changes to interactions between local food initiatives in a local food system in the NW of England during a crisis (Covid-19). Using resilience as a framework to understand these dynamics, the paper argues that social preconditions, such as a previously organised local food network in partnership with local authorities, have helped communities to self-organise and respond to difficult circumstances. Moreover, it also highlights the ways in which responses to major disruption can bring about the collective questioning of current models of emergency food provisioning and create stronger collaborative bonds between diverse organisations, potentially improving food insecurity outcomes.

Participants in the session will get a good understanding of how local food systems can lead to better food security outcomes. They will learn about how knowing more about the interconnectedness of individual initiatives and organisations within such systems can help in identifying any key organisations that play central roles in aiding collaborations, and also learn about how to identify where more focussed work might be done to aid future collaborations. Participants will see how a crisis or disruption can help illustrate the role of some central organisations and bodies. They will have the opportunity to discuss and explore whether and how other organisations might provide some of the ‘glue’ that is provided by a local authority in our example, and whether this is the best / most democratic level at which this support and connectivity should be provided.

There will be the opportunity for open discussion. We would love to hear what people see as the constraints to the network we have identified. Where they see opportunities for changes and where they feel other sectors need to be included. There will be the opportunity to be involved in other community conversations if participants wish. The issues raised by participants will be used in analysing a further dataset the research team have on the Lancaster local food system. We intend to coproduce a set of principles for organising resilient and democratic food systems from the discussion.

Speakers/hosts include:

Mags Adams – Mags is a transdisciplinary social scientist whose research focuses on sustainability and understanding the interconnections between people, places and social practices. My most recent work is concerned with human relationships and local food systems, especially in terms of food sovereignty and justice. I have recently been working on local food systems in relation to food procurement, food consumption and poverty, and sustainable agri-food systems and food security. I co-founded the Food Geographies Research Group at the Royal Geographical Society and chaired the Underlying causes of food poverty panel in developing the Greater Manchester Food Poverty Action Plan. I am a member of the Steering Group for the Food Futures Partnership in Lancashire and co-facilitated a Community Conversation to take forward the Lancaster People’s Jury recommendations on food. I currently lead a project Food citizenship: ‘who decides what I eat?’.

Tanya Zerbian – Tanya is a DTA3 COFUND/Marie-Curie Fellow at the University of Central Lancashire with research interests revolving mainly around sustainable agri-food systems and food security, having a background in community nutrition and public health. She is particularly concerned about how governance and the organisation of food systems and power relations affect food justice and accessibility related to food poverty and the food system. Recent research projects and her PhD project include analysing urban food strategies, local food initiatives’ connections and power configurations in local food systems.

Annie Wynn – Annie is the Development Director of Let’s Grow Preston. Let’s Grow Preston works tirelessly within the diverse communities of Preston to improve the environment of the City of Preston through cooperative environmental action. Our work and organisational values align with the Preston Economic Model and community wealth building. We have a radical, inclusive and equitable philosophy .

We operate two outstanding community gardens at Ashton Park and Grange Community Gardens, we are the umbrella environmental body for a thriving growing network of community groups such as park friends’ groups, food growing, allotment, environmental and community groups and associations.

LGP’s innovative work has put in place Public Liability Insurance and risk management procedures for all of its members to easily utilise to enable them to green the City of Preston for the benefit of people, wildlife and the environment.

LGP have run training and capacity building sessions with individuals and groups of all ages, backgrounds and abilities enabling them to create and care for community gardens, wildflower projects, food growing initiatives, beautifying grot spots and enriching biodiversity through sustainable planting schemes amongst much more. Our work has created real social and health benefits for those taking part in the volunteering and countless others who appreciate the transformative results in their neighbourhoods.

This has been recognised by the following awards

Social Prescribing Community organisation of the year 2021, Community group recognised for making real life changes to communities award by BBC Lancashire Radio Make a difference awards and Green Community Project of 2021 at the recent Best of Lancashire awards.

Familiar with public speaking, Annie has presented to Councils, national conferences and the most scary – the WI!

Farm walk: Growing Well and Low Sizergh Farm

Hosted by Growing Well and Low Sizergh Farm

Growing Well Kendal and Low Sizergh Farm are both based from the Sizergh Estate in Kendal.

Growing Well Kendal is a mental health charity, training centre and the biggest producer of organic vegetables in Cumbria. Between Monday and Thursday every week Growing Well open their doors to members of the community who have been referred via their GP due to their mental health to learn how to grow, sew, hoe and much more to provide veg boxes for the local community ‘crop share’ with a friendly team of volunteers at hand. The lead growers at the site will be able to walk you around the 8-year crop rotation on site and talk you through why organic practices are so important to them and the amazing progress they have made in the past few years.

Low Sizergh Farm is a working farm still run by three generations of the family. Alison can be found running the farm shop, gift gallery and café, whilst her brother Richard (who will be leading the tour) runs the farm with his son Matthew. John jokes that he’s now the farm boy sent to run all the errands and Marjorie spends as much time as possible painting in her shed. More than 50 local people are employed with Paul Seward working on the farm for nearly 30 years. They do everything with the future in mind, looking after the soil, the landscape and wildlife whilst being part of a vibrant rural economy. Their main crop is the grass that the cows eat all year round which helps them produce milk that they sell in the shop vending machine, the organic milk suppliers cooperative OMSCO and a local cheese and ice cream maker.

A point of interest would be how the farm started out as organic, changed to non-organic practices then back to organic for an array of reasons you’ll be able to discover on the tour.

You will need to book places on this walk separately. More information will be sent to all ticket-holders. There is additional information about Low Sizergh Farm below.

Low Sizergh Farm is a working farm still run by three generations of the Park family. They do everything with the future in mind, looking after the soil, the landscape and wildlife whilst being part of a vibrant rural economy.

Milk is sold through a vending machine outside the farm shop, the organic milk suppliers cooperative OMSCO and to a local cheese and ice cream maker.

Cows Youngstock: 168 Holstein x Swedish Red x Montbeliarde 109 Young
stock, cross breeding for 20 years with a strong emphasis on healthy cows and milk from forage.

Autumn block calved over 12 weeks

Grassland management:

All grazing is rotational, dairy cow platform split into 33 paddocks 1.45 HA 12-hour breaks, YS moved daily fields splitusing electric fences, front and back, with mobile water troughs. Sheep moved weekly.

Dry cows are mob grazed over parkland and permanent pasture.

Re seeding cow grazing with simple herbal ley ryegrass white & red clover chicory & plantain. Silage ryegrass red clover chicory and plantain. still experimenting to find the best mix, 4 cuts of silage and round bales from surplus grass on grazing area.

Arable: Spring barley and peas for whole crop on a 4-year rotation over the silage area

Conservation work:

Traditional hedge management
Re-planting of orchards with local varieties of apple, damson, plum
Creation of pond
Fencing off less useful grassland for wildlife habitat farm trail
HLS scheme ends Jan 22 considering the options

A point of interest would be how the farm started out as organic, changed to non-organic practices then back to organic after trainings in Holistic management and farm scale permaculture see how these practices have been incorporated in the farms management on the tour.

Farm walk: Working with farmers to balance environmental priorities and a profitable farm business

Hosted by the Ribble Rivers Trust

The Ribble Rivers Trust have worked with many Ribble Catchment farmers over the past decade. During the years we have been asked many questions, one of the most popular being how can I deliver environmental benefits whilst still having profitable business? This is what we are working on with all of our farmers. The Ribble Rivers Trust would like to invite you to site visit at one of the farms we have worked with for many years – Laund Farm, near Chipping, in the Forest of Bowland. Here we will discuss how we have worked with the farm, what environmental management we have recommended and how we have worked with the farmer to develop a sustainable farm business whilst also achieving environmental gains. We will discuss:
– Introduce the site, the aims of the farm and what the farmers aims were from the initial visit
– What was discovered from the pinpoint
– What funding was available
– What has been achieved
– What has been developed/ changed over time to both have environmental and farm business gains

You will need to book places on this walk separately. More information will be sent to all ticket-holders.

Lifting the lid – food game

Hosted by FoodFutures

Rod has spent the last year developing an educational board game on resilient food called ‘Lifting the lid’. The game works with a range of different food types and illustrates the difference between conventional and agroecological options for its production. For each food there are scores for its effect on human health, natures diversity, community building and other resilient food criteria. There are chance cards that help show how we can care for our future food system. This is a board game for up to 8 people . There will be 3 boards (total 24 participants). This game is in development so discussion and feedback will be encouraged. The intention of the game is to give participants an inside look at our food system and hopefully the participants will become inspired to change to a more agroecological future for food.

Speakers/hosts will include:

Rod Everett – Rod is an organic farmer in the Forest of Bowland producing unusual apple cider vinegar to stimulate health. An ecologist, researcher for FoodFutures, farm advisor, permaculture teacher and natural flood management consultant. He is also a founder of the Northern Real Farming Conference

Can organic principles and practices guide us in building community-led food and farming systems?

Hosted by the Organic Research Centre

At NRFC20 we ran a session to explore how we could develop an agroecology food and farming network in the North of England – at the same time, growing and connecting networks emerged as a strong theme from across the conference as a way to continue to develop the movement for better food and farming in the North of England. In our session, we identified three key areas to expand:

Bringing communities together across the region – creating an alliance that enables learning between the local level alternative food/farming initiatives.
Reflecting on our experiences to make sure we ‘catch the wave’ – that is, learning from existing successful (and not so successful) initiatives on how to make the most of the momentum building behind finding alternatives to the current system.
Communicating a common cause and expanding beyond our existing communities (e.g., different cultural landscapes) – including the notion of citizens identifying with the role that they play in developing a healthy, resilient food system. Being clear about the vision for the future that we want.

At NRFC21, we would like to build on this through the exploration of the values that we believe must underlie the self-sustaining hubs/networks that can build local economies. This will include exploring past and current experiences from organic farming in the UK – particularly in the North of England, where opportunities for expansion of organic and agroecological practices have been identified but challenges have also been identified.

There is a strong belief that real organic and agroecological principles can only be put into practice through the development of local communities and economies, although communities and economies built on shared values can (and do) exist and thrive beyond localities. However, ‘values’ in the abstract are not enough, communities and economies are built on ‘functional hubs’ e.g., markets, equipment or input sharing (e.g. seeds), shared transport/labour and shared identity (which occasionally emerges as local currencies, branding). Traceability, accountability, and support must also be considered.

Identifying and nurturing such ‘functional hubs’ based on farm practice and working structures is critical in developing genuinely alternative farming and food. To support this, in this session we will explore how the Organic Principles can guide the development of such hubs; what the practices are that we feel should feature on the farms and food businesses we choose to build local hubs around; and, how community culture and needs can be channelled as a driver to achieve truly sustainable local economies.

We would like to invite all those working towards embodying the principles of Health, Ecology, Fairness and Care, that offer the example of what is possible, to gather and share their experience. The ambition is to determine the synergies between what currently exists, identify gaps, and develop a framework to guide the development of local initiatives – from field to fork – that can de-mystify labels and make the fruits of an agroecological food and farming system accessible.

Speakers/hosts include:

Charlotte Bickler – Charlotte leads the Knowledge Exchange and Policy team at the Organic Research Centre, ensuring that ORC’s research gets out to its key stakeholders in the best format possible. She is based in West Yorkshire and has worked as a researcher at the ORC, Kew Gardens and The University of Bristol. Most recently, she has studied the application of evolutionary breeding within organic systems and developed an on-farm organic variety testing network (now a DEFRA funded project, LiveWheat) with her ORC Crops Team colleagues, Organic Arable and a group of participatory farmers. She has also coordinated knowledge exchange and on-farm trials of crop mixtures and worked to understand the enablers required to deliver crop diversification in European agriculture. She is working to develop local hubs built around Organic Principles and practices via the Organic at the Heart project which developed out of the NRFC20 session that she led (https://www.organicresearchcentre.com/our-research/research-project-library/organic-at-the-heart/).

Lawrence Woodward – Lawrence is a co-founder of the Organic Research Centre and was its director for 30 years. Under Lawrence’s directorship ORC and its advisory service helped establish and develop many farmer-based initiatives including the Organic Milk Suppliers Co-op, Organic Arable, The Organic Growers Alliance and a national Organic Farm Demonstration Network. Lawrence is currently a director of Whole Health Agriculture and continues to work with a range of farmer-based projects on health, food quality, seeds and producer development. He was one of the lead authors of the international Organic Principles of IFOAM (the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements).

Hannah Field – Hannah coordinates the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission’s (FFCC) Cumbria Inquiry and is a PhD Student at the University of Cumbria, researching Common Land. Hannah has spent the last 10 years in Cumbria, having worked for Forestry England and run her own business in wool craftwork, as well as studying at the University (BSc (Hons) in Animal Conservation Science and PGDip Ecosystem Services Evaluation). Her research and practical interests relate to how diverse perspectives and values in land management can be brought together for social and ecological benefit through place-based decision-making.

Steven Jacobs – Steven has been working in food and farming for 30 years, starting in market gardening and moving through farming to retail via catering. Following work with the Permaculture Association, the Co-operative Wholesale Society, Fresh & Wild (now Wholefoods Market) and Essential Trading Co-operative, Steven joined Organic Farmers & Growers in 2007. Steven represents OF&G on a number of roundtables, forums and working groups: Agricology, IFOAM EU, the NFU Organic Forum and the Agriculture Working Party of Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. Steven is the founder and coordinator of the annual organic farming conference, the OF&G National Organic Combinable Crops, also known as NOCC. Steven chairs the Welsh Grain Forum and also sits on the steering committee for the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference – WRFFC / Cynhadledd Gwir Fwyd a Ffermio Cymru – CGFFfC and Food Manifesto Wales.